Word: hitchcocks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stage Fright (Warner) is a comedy melodrama that most moviemakers could be proud of. For Director Alfred Hitchcock, who must compete with his own overpowering reputation, it is something less. Far superior to his recent, blighted Under Capricorn, it is hardly in the running with such oldtime Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes...
Never a man to make things easy for himself, Director Hitchcock has tried in Stage Fright to work within the discipline of a tricky story conceit: his heroine (Jane Wyman) plays romantic nip & tuck simultaneously with a suspected murderer (Richard Todd) and the Scotland Yard man (Michael Wilding) who is tracking him down. Hitchcock exploits the situation as much for chuckles as for chills. The result is an entertaining show, handsomely produced against a London background, studded with effective scenes and enlivened by an excellent cast that includes an uncannily young and beautiful Marlene Dietrich and able British Comedian Alistair...
Having made three more movies in England (one is Alfred Hitchcock's Stage-fright), he went to Hollywood a few weeks ago with his Scottish bride of six months. The screen's hottest "discovery" in many months, now working on another picture for Warner (Lightning Strikes Twice), Todd is still somewhat dazed by the studio's Academy Award aspirations for his performance...
...find it one of the best of 1950. Like The Fallen Idol, by the same brilliant British team-Director Carol Reed and Scripter Graham Greene-it adds an extra depth of character insight and a new texture of pictorial eloquence to the kind of spellbinding thriller that made Alfred Hitchcock famous...
...filmed in a forlorn, postwar Vienna, The Third Man is crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud-ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre. But the central characters are not mere pawns in a melodrama; they are motivated people who speak grown-up dialogue and feel contagious emotions. The film's most original touch: a unique musical sound track using only a hauntingly twanging zither* which...